I recently visited Memory Lane Heritage Village in Lake Charlotte. It ​is a living history museum depicting coastal rural life in Nova Scotia during the 1940s. My five year old son had a great time. He especially enjoyed sitting in the 1928 Ford Model A car and pretending to drive. On the way back home I was thinking about other living history museums in Nova Scotia and realized that, based on my experience, it appears that the further away from my home in Halifax that I drive, the farther back in time the museums depict. When I got home, I dug up some data. Sherbrooke Village depicts a typical Nova Scotian village from the 1860s and the Fortress of Louisbourg allows you to experience life in Louisbourg during the 1740s.

I used Google Maps to find the driving distance from my house to each of these locations and discovered a nearly perfect linear relationship. How perfect you ask? The correlation coefficient was 0.99906. I quickly created a scatter plot with a line of best fit to show my wife. Despite my exuberance, she appeared to remain unimpressed.

It is also interesting to see that the points on the scatter plot are almost exactly where the sites are on a map of Nova Scotia as well. Mind Blown.

A question that I still have is whether this apparent temporal relationship is based on distance or displacement. Perhaps I need to collect some additional data (or not intentionally disregard data that doesn't fit my hypothesis)? If I travel in the opposite direction, should a living history museum depict life in the past or in the future? I'd love to visit Yarmouth some day to experience what life will be like in rural Nova Scotia in the year 2213!